Reflecting on Practice: I have a question

March25

questions
I had a brain fart about what’s going in my classroom looking back on the year. If I had something to improve on or do over this year, with this class, it would be to work with students on getting them to ask better question.

What do I mean by better questions? Where am I seeing problems? What could I do better? I think I have some answers…

What do I mean by better questions?

I’d like my kids asking questions that show:

  • Engagement with the subject, just some basic level of interest. I see this, but not consistently. A lot of their work is rote.
  • Some depth of thinking so that the question doesn’t just ask for knowledge, but shows some thinking both in the question and the answer required.

Where I’m seeing problems

There are a couple of places where I’m having them ask questions. The big assignment was they had to generate a question to research about an ancient civilization. Many of the questions they wrote were one-dimensional, boiler-plate, on popular easy to answer topics, etc. A typical question was “How did they make mummies?” By the time of their paper, this had been well-covered in class via video, and other sources.

The other place they do questions is each week after reading our subject matter text (Earth Science and Ancient Civilization), I have them do a re-read in small groups, and come up with a question. I give them flip-books with question starters organized by Bloom’s Taxonomy levels. I’ve written more about them here. The questions I’m getting this year have not been great but rather rote. I can tell because they are a little off, either grammatically, or conceptually. They just didn’t “fit” which showed that the students might not really understand what they were asking, or what a good answer would be. Some of the questions I could tell they had an answer in mind, but the question wasn’t clear. Other times, the question looked okay, but the answer was going to be…flat.

What could I do better?

Obviously, this has worked better in the past. Some of this may be my instruction. Some of it may be the students. A lot of it is a mix of the two. My guess is that I have gotten so comfortable with my question instruction, and my students started out so strong, that I missed signs that they were not growing in their question making strategies. In the case of the research papers, that process was too rushed. More time was needed to give feedback at the start of this process that didn’t take place.  The easy answer would be to say, “Well these students are obviously not as ‘bright’ as my prior students!”. They obviously need more feedback and guidance, which I haven’t given them after they’ve written question. The only thing that was “dim” was my lack of follow-up, not the kids.

Image Credit: questions by Roland O’Daniel, on Flickr

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